Mobile Health: Engaged patients. Empowered teams.

Any device. Any time. Virtually anywhere.

This has been the demand of consumers and the mantra of Verizon for a while now, and we’ve been championing a “mobile first” innovation strategy to help healthcare organizations meet that demand. But mobility is no longer a demand. It’s a reality. The question of whether to go mobile has been asked and answered. The mobile public is now more interested in “what” mobile can deliver than “where” and “when” it is enabled because ubiquity is now assumed.

For healthcare, there’s likely been no more critical investment in technology they’ve had to make than in mobile engagement and the infrastructure required to support it. But the payoff has been in the ability to untether patients, clinicians and care teams from traditional location-based care coordination and delivery. But with the subtle shift in healthcare toward end-to-end patient experience, mobile solutions can be leveraged in new and dynamic ways beyond just care provision. Wow-factor experiences for patients and game-changing digital tools for remote care team members are redefining what “mobile” looks like.

So much of the cutting-edge technology that is truly transforming care engagement and personal experience – like the use of augmented reality to deliver multimedia content, deploying digital signage and wayfinding capabilities to support site navigation, using predictive artificial intelligence (AI) to personalize patient engagement – is predicated on the integration of the right mobile app leveraging specific imbedded functions connecting to on-site capabilities that together deliver the magic. Mobility ties the experience to the patient or the clinician, who is empowered with device in hand and with the right information at the right time.

What are the possibilities?

The frontier of mobile, digital patient experience is vast, with tremendous potential to redefine the way we experience the healthcare ecosystem. Where mobility, virtualization, innovative apps and new tech converge, industries like healthcare now have the ability to:

Deliver dynamic content across a fleet of digital signs that can support everything from on-site navigation to continuing education offerings to preop and postop care information.

Deploy a fleet of wearable devices, such as smartwatches, to support patient wellness programs or equip care teams with task management and data collection in ways that support near real-time clinical decision-making.

Digital transformation across industries is shaping this evolution at the digital edge – where a host of mobile capabilities can be fused with emerging tech and next-generation mobile apps to boost customer experience and workforce enablement. This is where a lot of digital convergence is truly happening. The healthcare experience of the future will be mobile, fluid and flexible, but so much of this is ready right now – capabilities just waiting to be explored, integrated and scaled.